


Purely Cosmetic

by MsOuroboros



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-06
Updated: 2017-07-06
Packaged: 2018-11-28 14:16:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11419728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MsOuroboros/pseuds/MsOuroboros
Summary: Hancock invites a medical team to move to Goodneighbor and act as the new doctors.  He didn't foresee the personal issues their presence would cause.





	Purely Cosmetic

Deacon liked to play this game, the disguises, passing on information through offhand messages and half truths. It wasn't necessary anymore. The Institute was long since in ruin, Goodneighbor had a fair amount of goodwill for the escaped synths they harbored and a ton of people knew Deacon despite the disguises.

Still, Hancock would play the game, acting casual as the Railroad agent fell in step beside him as he left the Third Rail.

"Hey, Mayor Hancock! You know you got the best damn bar in the Commonwealth over there."  
"Yeah, you think so?"  
"Sure do! And Magnolia's the best singer, by far."  
"Damn straight."  
"I'd even say Goodneighbor's got the best weapon shop too."  
"I ain't got no complaints about my girl KLEO."

Deacon stopped, and snapped his fingers, as though an idea had just struck him. "You know what this town could use though? A good doctor."  
"Yeah? They ain't easy to find, and most wouldn't want to go into business in a joint like this one."

"I might know a group, two good doctors lead by a damn fantastic one. Kind of doctor who could put a new face on a guy every few months without a single scar. And, just your luck, they might be looking to settle down in a new place now that they don't have to be in hiding."

Hancock contemplated for a few moments before responding, "Well, why don't you let those docs know that I have an empty warehouse where they could set up shop, so long as they are willing to help our little community here."  
"Well, hey! Sure Mayor Hancock! You always have the best ideas!  
And Hancock laughed to himself as Deacon skipped away.

\-----

A month later Hancock stood on the balcony of the State House and watched the latest additions to Goodneighbor. He was not necessarily regretting his decision to invite them in, but certainly reconsidering it. The lead doctor had ended up being a honey skinned woman with a waist length braid in her mid forties, who introduced herself as Doctor Patel. The other two were younger, identical twin brothers in buzzcuts who went by Doctor Ray and Doctor Rob, who Hancock had immediately gotten confused. They had spent the last four days dragging in Brahmin load after Brahmin load of equipment. Generators roared on the roof of the warehouse, and now he watched as they struggled in the front gate with a gray, coffin like tube.

There was nothing wrong with the medical team, it was just that they had been buried into their own work and not really interacted with anyone in town. Hell, other than to briefly learn their names, they'd barely spoken to him. They didn't need to be buddy buddy, but if they closed themselves off it was going to foster gossip and suspicion with the townsfolk, and that was the sort of issues this town didn't need.

Maybe they just needed another professional to talk to? He decided to go and ask Dr Amari to go pay them a visit. Maybe ask her to bring a mutfruit basket or a bouquet of empty syringes or something to welcome a fellow medico to the neighborhood.

Early that afternoon, he was leaving to do just that when the yells started from over by the Hotel Rexford.

"Muties! Raid!"  
"Shit." Hancock had his shotgun out in a second. He rounded the corner to see the junk wall protecting the end of the street buckling. It looked like the mutants were ramming it from the reverse side, howls and grunts surging each time they slammed into it.

"Brace the wall!" He yelled as people rounded the corner. A minute later a dozen people were wheeling a dumpster from the alley. Hancock joined in pushing and they almost had it flush to the buckling wall when suddenly the ground burst into flames. He jumped back from the fire, swatting at himself to put out the hem of his coat and looked up, confused. A super mutant stood high above on the overpass and as he watched, he threw another lit Molotov cocktail down towards Goodneighbor.

"Move! Incoming!" He yelled, and a neighborhood watch guard ran past, his shirt in flames panicked. Hancock tackled him to the ground, rolling out the fire. He glanced up again just in time to see the super mutant suddenly clutch his head and topple forward, falling the hundred feet and landing with a wet sickening crunch on the wall by the hotel. MacCready was obviously in town, no one else could have made that shot.

"The wall!" Someone yelled, and Hancock turned in time to see the sheet metal buckle forward, leaving a foot wide tear in the wall. A green face poked through for a moment before it was replaced by the muzzle of a mini gun. Before it could whir to life, the streets filled with a deafening barrage as the citizens opened fire through the gap. 

The mutant fell dead to the side and the gunshots decreased for a moment, revealing another sound.

"Suicider! Run!" But it was close, too close, and he barely had time to turn when the wall blew in, throwing him to the ground in front of the Rexford.

The world was white for a moment, and he checked mentally to make sure no new parts were missing from him. Through the ringing in his ears and the cloud of smoke, he was barely able to see a red and black blur charging through the new hole in the wall. KLEO, he realized, was picking of the mutants not killed by the suicider.

He pulled himself up by a lamp post, and his stomach sank at what he saw. People, HIS people lying thrown about by the bomb. His streets were stained with blood. Hancock took a few staggered steps towards the closest still figure. A drifter, still breathing, but his chest was torn open, blood pooling from a head wound. He lay close to where Vic's goons had once killed a drifter, Hancock realized.

And shit, there weren't enough stimpacks left at the State a House and a drifter had stolen his MedX. He had to do something, fix this, but how. He was useless, he had failed his people.

"Move!" Hancock jumped at the voice, authoritative and loud, and charging by him was Doctor Patel, a hard cased kit in her arms. A few steps behind were the twins, a jumble of fabric stretched between them that Hancock quickly realized were stretchers folded up, and bags strung over their shoulders.

"High priority! Over here!" Dr Patel called, dropping to her knees by the wounded man at Hancock's feet. She felt for his pulse and spoke rapid fire to the two other doctors, "Back to surgery. Now."

The twins quickly transferred his body to a stretcher, but Hancock grabbed a set of the handles, gesturing with his chin to one of the doctors "go help, I got this." Then he and the other twin were racing down the street, the man between them moaning. He was so young, had come to Goodneighbor running from something, only to end up like this. There was no chance he was going to make it, Hancock thought, looking at the torn meat of his torso. He just hoped there was enough Med X at their clinic to let him fade out pain free.

To his surprise, the twin doctor immediately started to cut his clothes off and injected him with something. Apparently, he was going to try to save the guy. He wasn't about to argue, and instead raced back to the battle site. 

The other twin doctor (Ray?/Rob?) was bent over a ghoul who had her hand clutching her side in pain. He looked up at Hancock and pointed at the case Dr Patel had been carrying. "Get me formula Gamma-2"

"What?" He glanced over into the case, where multi colored auto injectors were arranged, each carefully labeled. That explained it, and he plucked the correct one and brought it to the doctor.

"Mayor!" Behind him, Ham, the bouncer from the Third Rail, stood by a stretcher. On it, a drifter was screaming and writhing in pain, her leg a shattered mess. He helped Ham lift her and rushed back to the clinic.

Inside, the table when the drifter had been earlier was empty, and Hancocks stomach dropped as he scanned around the room for him.

"He will recover," the twin doctor (Rob?/Ray?) said, gesturing towards a row of weird steel tube in the corner. Through the fogged window, Hancock could just barely see the outline of the kids face, "I stabilized him, the Auto Doc will handle the rest."

He turned his attention to the drifter they just brought in, and frowned, "Hand me two Omega injectors from that box. I'll need to remove shrapnel first."

"Amputation?"

"No, we can save the leg," the twin said, which Hancock found hard to believe. The leg was a mangled mess, shattered bone sticking out at odd angles. He stayed and held the tray with one hand while the doc dropped bits of metal into it, while holding the drifters hand on the other side and letting her squeeze his fingers. Then watched for a moment as the doctor pressed pieces of bone back in place, following each up with an injection of something that seemed to knit the bone fragments back in place.

He left after a murmured assertion to the drifter that she was in good hands, and returned to the Rexford. It looked... not bad. There was still blood on the streets, but everyone was up and about, comforting each other. 

"We lose anybody?" his voice was loud enough to carry.

"Nobody Mayor!" "We licked those muties!" "Of the people for the people!" came shouts back and cheers. Hancock let out a breath he didn't know he was holding, then pulled himself to full height and walked around, checking on the people.

One of the twin doctors was patching up a few minor scrapes and burns on a Neighborhood Watch member. Hancock said a few words to the guard, then gazed into the box where they had been pulling the strange syringes. They reminded him of multi colored gumdrops in a box, but the labels confused him.

As if reading his mind, the twin doctor explained, "those are Doctor Patels inventions. See, a stimpack encourages cellular regrowth indiscriminately. These each target specific tissue types for regeneration. Gives us a lot more control over healing. As far as I know she is the first to ever develop that technology,"

Hancock whistled through his teeth, "No kidding? She ever brew up anything of a more.... recreational variety?"

For a moment he regretted saying it, after all most of the medical type weren't big on chems. But to his surprise the twin doctor laughed as he flushed clean a burn on the arm of the ghoul he was working on. "Once this is all handled, I'll see what I can do."

\----

The next night he couldn't believe he ever worried about the doctors fitting in. He was sprawled on a couch in the back of the Third Rail. The wall by the Rexford was patched was patched, no one had been killed, and the whole town was in a celebratory mood, drinks on Hancock.

They were damn good docs, that was for sure. Plus, Patel had handed him a green inhaler as a thank you for inviting her into town. Mellower than Daddy-o, but a happier high than psycho. Damned if he knew what it was but he was going to try to get it on the menu permanently. Green was a great color. He should have his coat dyed green.

And the drifter he thought was a goner was sitting at a table, nursing a Nuka Cola. Damn good guy. Yesterday blasted to bits, today he looked barely hung over. Good on him.

And the twin docs were each grabbing beers from Charlie and gesturing and talking about someone behind Hancock. Good on them too.

And Ham sat on a bar stool next to Doctor Patel, and they leaned in closer to each other, his hand on her knee. Good on both of them.

And Hancock tipped his head back against the couch cushions. Good on this whole damn town. Everything was right and good.

He opened his eyes when pressure on the couch showed he had company, and realized one of the twin doctors had sat down next to him, pulling out another green inhaler. "So, which one are you? Ray or Rob?"

"Can't tell us apart?" the twin said with a drunken laugh, "I'm Ray. The real question is, can you tell which of us was the original human and which is the synth?"

That... was a question he would unpack later, when he was more sober. For now, he brushed the ramifications aside and took a hit from the inhaler Ray offered. The room swirled down into a hazy sheen and he smiled over at Ham and Doctor Patel. They were about as close as the bar stools allowed, laughing, smiling and sharing air, a definite spark. Magnolia crooned and the pipes hissed and Charlie grumbled about dirty glasses, andHancock let himself sink further into the couch.

He let the world flow over him for the longest time when he barely noticed Doctor Patel stand, letting her face drift close to Ham's and her hand slide over his knee before heading towards the women's bathroom. Ham watched her for leave, a smitten look on his face, then suddenly seemed concerned. He stood and crossed to the couch to where Ray slouched by Hancock.

"Hey Doc? You know Sonya pretty well, doncha? I mean, you know her a while."

"Hey, you know Doctor Patel well enough to be on a first name basis after knowing her one night!" Ray said, his voice a little too high and broken from the chems. "But yeah, I've known her a few years, why?"

"See, a guy in my position just wants to be sure before he do anything that might upset a dame, you know? So, uh, I think I'm reading her signals all right, but I want to make sure I ain't barking up a wrong tree. She.... she ain't got no issue with ghouls, right?"

Ray started laughing, hysterical and too loud. "No. Ha! Hey Rob? Guy wants to know if Patel has any issues with ghouls!" The other doctor looked up from where he was chatting with a drifter and shook his head. "No, she has no issues with ghouls. It would be hypocritical if she did, considering she is one."

What? Hancock cast an accusatory glance at the green inhaler, before registering that that he had heard right. "Hey now, even I ain't high enough to mistake a ghoul for a smoothskin. What kind of prank you pulling?"

"No prank! No prank at all. She figured out how to deal with the cosmetic side effects of ghoulification, that's all."

Ham sucked in his breath through his teeth, and gazed across the room to where Doctor Patel was making her way down the ramp. His face looked like he was seeing an angel.

Hancock took another pull from the green inhaler and let it wash away his thoughts. Tonight had been good, no need to ruin it with this much thought.

**Author's Note:**

> Things that never made sense to me: stimpacks, the fact that there's obviously plastic surgery but ghouls don't explore it.
> 
> Also, I made Ham a little smarter than he seems to be in game.


End file.
